“I wouldn’t recognize a Kander & Ebb song if it came in and slapped me on the face,” the composer John Kander said on Saturday night at “Life Is a Cabaret: A Tribute to Fred Ebb,” a salute to his longtime musical partner that was part of the “Lyrics & Lyricists” series. Beginning in the 1960s, composer Kander and lyricist Ebb were masters of the integrated “book” musical show, where story and character were all-important and even dictated the nature of the score.

Unlike in the days of Cole Porter and Irving Berlin, songwriters were no longer supposed to have a recognizable sound when Kander & Ebb were at their peak. When they declared “life is a cabaret” in “Cabaret” and that “life is what you do when you’re waiting to die” in “Zorba,” it was understood that they were expressing the point of view of their characters, not their own take on life.

Yet “Life Is a Cabaret” (which finishes a three-day run at the 92nd Street Y today) shows that the work of this incredibly successful Broadway duo was consistently excellent from show to show. Most of their best work was set in the roaring ’20s and the swinging ’30s; indeed, few of their productions took place in the era in which they were actually written. Mr. Kander (who will be 81 in March) and Ebb (who died in 2004 at 71) wrote most frequently for larger-than-life leading ladies, usually Liza Minnelli and Chita Rivera. (The earliest song in the current L&L presentation, “Heartbreaker,” is a slice of Ebb juvenilia written with Judy Garland in mind.) Kander & Ebb tended to favor big, Garland-style vaudeville slowdown endings, in which the composers made things exciting by bringing the tempo down rather than up. With one of these ritardando climaxes in your head, you can visualize a line of chorus girls kicking and turning.

In the context of the current tribute at the 92nd Street Y, Kander & Ebb’s predilection for big, name-above-the-title divas made it regrettable that the two female performers who do the bulk of the singing in “Life Is a Cabaret,” Diana Canova and Judy Blazer, are decidedly smaller than life. Then, too, the deck was stacked against them: At least a third of K&E’s productions (including “Flora the Red Menace,” “The Act,” “Liza With a Z,” “The Rink,” “New York, New York,” and the film version of “Cabaret”) were written for Ms. Minnelli, and those songs all seem like signatures, ultimately inseparable from her. I don’t even consider myself a fan of Ms. Minnelli, yet I couldn’t help visualizing her when Ms. Canova attempted “Ring Them Bells” or Ms. Blazer described “Arthur in the Afternoon.” The artistic director, Rob Fisher, would have done better to avoid the Minnelli-associated numbers or do something radical with them, such as make them polkas or mambos or have a man sing them — although not in the case of “Arthur in the Afternoon.”

The one woman on the stage who lived up to the Kander & Ebb ideal of a commanding leading lady was special guest Tyne Daly: Even though it was immediately evident she hadn’t completely rehearsed her material and was keeping her eyes on her lyric sheet rather than the crowd, she took over and held the stage. On “When You’re Good to Mama” (from “Chicago”), she showed how to get a laugh with just a pause in the right place, and she was also completely winning on “The Grass Is Always Greener” (from “Woman of the Year”) in spite of, or perhaps because, she was missing a page of lyrics and had to improvise. Ms. Daly’s climactic “Yes” was highly agreeable, much more so than Olympia Dukakis’s performance in the recent “Encores” production of “70 Girls 70.”

“Life Is a Cabaret” was better supplied in the male department. It was surprising that Mr. Fisher didn’t host himself (he did an excellent job of that last month at Lincoln Center’s Leonard Bernstein evening), but David Garrison handled the emcee role amenably. As a singer, Mr. Garrison delivered a moving “At the Rialto,” which whetted our collective appetite for K&E’s musical version of “The Skin of Our Teeth,” a project that seems to have been in perpetual development since the stone age and still hasn’t made it to Broadway.

The additional presence of Brent Barrett made all the difference: He is one of the outstanding traditional, old-school leading men currently trodding the boards, and his singing is full of depth, texture, dimension, and sensitivity. He was wistful and folksy on “Seeing Things,” romantic on “Wet,” funny on “Coffee in a Cardboard Cup” (giving his duet partner, Ms. Blazer, her finest moment), and rousing on “Life Is.”

Although not all the singers were optimal, Mr. Fisher more than made his point. For nearly 50 years, Kander & Ebb have been a Broadway institution: Not only can one almost always find one of their shows on Broadway, but in the last decade they’ve often had two productions going at once — currently it’s “Chicago” and “Curtains.” “Life is a Cabaret” handily achieved its goal of showing us why.

wfriedwald@nysun.com